Breathe Page 7

  I glanced at Becca, standing behind the bar counting the money in the registers and preparing for the busy night ahead. Her shoulder-length auburn hair fell in her face as she worked. “You ever do something you couldn’t take back?” I asked my uncle.

  He followed my gaze to Becca then turned back to me. “When you love someone—truly love ‘em—I don’t think there is such a thing. Might not be easy, but you can always find a way to forgive ‘em. The trick is knowing when they’ve hurt you more than you love them.” Rapping on the table with his knuckles, my uncle stood up to leave. “Call him,” he ordered.

  “C’mon now,” he laughed when I gave him a questioning look. “You think I didn’t notice you checking your phone every five minutes?” Offering another reassuring smile, he placed his hand on mine. “Whatever it is, I’m sure he’ll forgive you. I don’t think there’s an amount of hurt greater than the amount of love that boy has for you.”

  I knew he was right. For Garrett forgiveness would never be a problem like it was for me. I was more concerned about his capacity to forget. Would he always see the blood on my hands? The stains on my clothes? Would he look at me and see Tom Ford?

  Not for the first time, I wondered how it was the two of us came to be friends. We were so different. He lived on the good side of town in a house three times the size of the small apartment Maggie and I shared, with parents who cooked dinner every night and remembered little things like their children’s birthdays. Garrett had been born and raised in the city, transferring to Little Bend after his father took a job teaching Geometry and coaching the high school swim team. He hadn’t spent his life in this soul-sucking hellhole, wondering whether he’d have been better off if his mother had gotten an abortion.

  There was no reason for Garrett to like me. He was kind and good in all the ways that I wasn’t. Yet, Garrett wasn’t just my friend, he was my best friend. My only friend.

  “Any luck?” Uncle Jim asked me later.

  I shook my head. Two phone calls straight to voicemail. Neither of them returned.

  “Why don’t you go get in the car? I’m gonna get my keys, then we’ll go for a ride.”

  I hung my apron on a hook by the rear entrance. The weather had changed from warm to bitter following the rain so I grabbed my jacket before exiting through the back door to the small alleyway that existed between my uncle’s bar and the veterinary office next door.

  Large, chain-link cages lined one side of the alleyway. Dogs pushed their snouts against and through the holes, snarling and yapping, clearly annoyed by my presence. I reached into my jacket pocket for the dog treats I kept there then approached the cage farthest from the door. Inside, curled up into a quiet ball of fur, was the ancient and scraggly Labrador I’d named Charlie. “Com’ere, Charlie,” I called as I crouched down and extended my open hand through a link.

  Charlie stirred, hobbled over on his weak legs, and sniffed at the treat in my palm. It had taken a long time to gain this tentative level of trust between Charlie and I. When he’d first arrived six months ago he’d been sick, beaten, and angry. An abandoned dog that had been used, abused, then left to die. Gave us a lot in common.

  Dr. Cross had fixed Charlie’s body best she could but she hadn’t the tools to repair his spirit. At first we’d only stared at one another, I perched on the stoop outside the door and Charlie in his cage. He’d never growled, merely eyed me suspiciously, like he thought I was after his food. I’d taken it slowly, each day speaking to him more and more as I inched closer and closer to his cage. The first time I’d reached in to pet him I’d done so with a fistful of leftover meat. When he’d finished his meal, he’d allowed me to stroke a spot behind his ear. That is until the bar door had opened and Uncle Jim had called my name. Startled, Charlie had snapped at my hand, taking a few scraps of my flesh before retreating to the back of the cage.

  Now I could reach in without fear. I knew that if I tried to hurt him, or made any sudden movements, our friendship would mean little. He would snap. But I was aware of the risk before I stuck my hand through the fence. It would never surprise me. In this way, I suppose it was the most honest relationship I’d ever known.

  “You ready to go, darling?” Uncle Jim asked as he appeared behind me.

  I nodded, wiping my hands on my jeans as I stood. “Where we going,” I asked.

  “We’re gonna go visit grandpa.”

  A while later, Shady Acres appeared before us tucked into the side of the mountain to the right of the interstate. It looked more institutional than the residential community it purported to be. I’d always thought of senior care centers as human public storage. Like the old and useless things people tucked away in metal crates, Shady Acres was a place to store someone you weren’t yet ready to let go of, but who you didn’t want hanging around your home, cluttering up your space.

  Grandpa Rhoades had been in storage since I was eight, when his mind had gone and they’d found him wandering half-naked down Main Street during the Independence Day parade. I remember tagging along with Uncle Jim when he’d brought him to live there, unsure why the man who always kept butterscotch in his pocket for me was being sent away. Like the puppy Uncle Jim had bought me earlier that year that Maggie’d left on the side of the road one day because it’d done its business in her bed. As if a little puppy urine had been the worst thing to happen to her sheets.

  Maggie hadn’t gone that day either. Uncle Jim told me once that Maggie and Grandpa Rhoades hadn’t spoken since the day Maggie tried to run off. To follow the English teacher who’d gotten her pregnant to California. The day I was born and ruined her plans.

  I wasn’t much better though as I hadn’t been back to visit him since the day we dropped him off. Uncle Jim came religiously once a week on Sundays to read to him or sit with him, but I’d never returned after that first time. Uncle Jim always said it was just as well. Grandpa Rhoades usually couldn’t remember what day it was or who anyone was. Too many faces confused him.

  I don’t think I’d have gone that day either if I hadn’t needed something to distract me from Garrett. It was either go to Shady Acres or sit at home staring at a phone that refused to ring. So, I’d hopped in the car and driven hours away, listening to Uncle Jim sing George Jones and Merle Haggard. Unlike the other members of my family, who couldn’t hold a tune in a bucket, Uncle Jim had a smooth, deep voice. I suppose in another life he could’ve made a living with music. It seemed an awful shame that the only people who ever got to hear him sing were me and Becca. Then again, it seemed me and Becca were all the fans he ever needed.

  A receptionist with poufy black hair greeted us from behind a large wall of a desk, her head nearly obscured by the flowers and brochures on the countertop. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Rhoades,” she cooed at my uncle.

  They conversed for a few minutes, the receptionist batting her long, overdone eyelashes and telling Uncle Jim that Grandpa Rhoades was pretty alert when she’d visited him that morning. I’d forgotten the affect my uncle could have on women, he’d been with Becca so long. But if I wasn’t mistaken, poufy-haired-big-eyed girl was flirting with him.

  She ignored me completely, handing me my visitor’s badge without so much as a glance in my direction. Made me appreciate Becca all the more. She at least understood that my uncle and I were a package deal. Couldn’t have one without the other.

  “What a witch,” I whispered to my uncle as we made our way to Grandpa’s room.

  “Cindy? No, she’s a sweetheart.”

  “Oh, Cindy, is it?” I teased. “Well maybe to you she’s sweet. I could’ve burst into flames and she wouldn’t have offered me a glass of water.”

  Uncle Jim gave a small chuckle but he didn’t dispel my theory, just opened a door and ushered me into Grandpa’s cell. A small room with one of those adjustable hospital beds, a window and a single chair. At least it had a TV, mounted on the wall in a corner close to the ceiling.

  It shocked me still to see Grandpa’s features. Especially as t
hey were now, gnawed and twisted, shiny in the sunlight that leaked through the dirty glass. Patches of pink and red hairless skin existed where his face should be. The fire that mangled his body happened before the madness. Right before Maggie tried to leave town.

  He’d tried to explain it to me once, my Uncle Jim. When I was younger. When I questioned the strange formation of Grandpa’s skin. He’d told me Grandpa had been a drinker before the accident. That he’d fallen asleep with a lit cigarette and a mattress doused with vodka. Maggie hadn’t been home, that was the day she’d run off. The day she would’ve left me, alone and crying, in a stall at the bus depot if Uncle Jim hadn’t stopped her.

  Now I stared at my grandfather’s distorted features and wondered if he still felt the answer to all his problems lay at the bottom of a bottle. I wondered why there wasn’t a lesson in that for Maggie. Had she never seen her father as he was now? Not once? Not even in pictures? I’d stopped her from burning down our own apartment several times—removing bottles, wiping up spills, stubbing out cigarettes. Had Maggie had to do the same for her father?

  I’d witnessed Maggie’s descent firsthand and wanted nothing to do with alcohol. Had she been like me at seventeen? Clean and sober? Wanting a future? A way out of this town? Was it a never-ending cycle? Would I be just like her in my thirties? Would I find solace in the empty numbness? Seek love from those incapable of giving it?

  “Jim,” Grandpa croaked in greeting.

  “Hi, Pop,” Uncle Jim replied. He took a seat on the bed beside his father and motioned for me to take the lonesome chair by the window.

  “You brought Maggie,” Grandpa said and I knew that he meant me.

  “No, Pop. This is Abby. Maggie’s daughter. Your granddaughter.”

  Grandpa looked confused, his eyes darting back and forth between me and Uncle Jim. It couldn’t have been easy on him considering how much I resembled Maggie. Spitting image, folks in town had always told me. “Maggie never had no baby,” the old man argued.

  “The nurses tell me you’re behaving yourself,” Uncle Jim said, trying to change the subject but Grandpa was fixated.

  “Look at her,” he wailed, pointing at me. “She’s just a girl herself. She’s a good girl. She wouldn’t run around getting herself knocked up. No sir. Now would you, Maggie?”

  Oh, but she would, I thought to myself. She had. I was warm-blooded, living proof that his Maggie wasn’t near as angelic as he wanted to believe. Poor old man. Maybe it would’ve been best if we didn’t shatter his illusions. Maybe Maggie could have remained forever—in one person’s eyes—perfect.

  “Come sit by me, Maggie baby,” Grandpa called to me.

  “I’m fine right here,” I answered at the same time Uncle Jim insisted, “That’s not Maggie, Pop.”

  “It is too, Jim. You think I don’t know my own daughter?” Grandpa’s voice got louder with each word until he was practically shouting.

  “Maybe I should wait outside,” I said as I stood to take my leave. Uncle Jim nodded his approval so I went to wait in the hall, closing the door behind me while Grandpa shouted Maggie’s name. A few minutes passed before Uncle Jim went to find a nurse who came back and administered a sedative while Uncle Jim went to speak with the doctor.

  “He’s asking for you,” the nurse told me when she finally emerged from Grandpa’s room.

  “Me?”

  She wrote something on the chart that hung on the closed door then placed her pen in a pocket on her shirt. “You’re Maggie, right?”

  May as well have been.

  “Don’t be frightened,” she said. “I gave him something to calm him down. Go on now. He won’t bite.”

  Once she was gone, I opened the door and crossed the room to the chair by the window again. Grandpa’s eyes were droopy, folding in to his mottled skin. “Maggie,” he wheezed at me, the emphysema taking hold. “Come ‘ere, Maggie. Come sit with me.”

  I didn’t want to but I also didn’t want to hear him call me her name again. So I moved to sit beside him the way Uncle Jim had done before. He patted my hand with his mangled, arthritic digits. “You still love your daddy, right, Maggie?”

  Something in his voice set me edge. It was a tone I knew too well. A tone I’d heard oozing from Tom’s mouth. Come on, Abby. Be a good girl, Abby. You love me, right, Abby?

  “Give daddy a kiss,” he was telling me and pulling my cheek toward his lips. My empty stomach fell and turned in on itself as his cold, wrinkled lips made contact with my skin. He pulled on me until I leaned down, my ear practically touching his lips. “Did you think you would get away with it?” he asked in a whisper. “I know what you did.”

  My head snapped back, my heart stopping then thumping back to life as the fear set in. How could he? He couldn’t know. No one except me and Garrett were there that night.

  “You think I don’t know?” he shouted as I stood up. I tried to pull my hand away but he caught me by the wrist, a surprising strength to his bony grip. “Did you think I wouldn’t know, you little bitch?” His fingernails dug into the soft skin on the inside of my wrist. I pulled back farther, wincing as my flesh tore.

  “Look what you did to me,” he accused. “Look at my face. And you think I wouldn’t know?”

  I finally wrenched my arm away, stumbled over my feet and crashed against the wall. My spine screamed in agony.

  “I don’t drink vodka, you little bitch. I never drank vodka. I know it was you who set that fire. Did you think you’d be able to get away. You’re mine, Maggie. You hear me? You’ll always be mine.”

  He continued to spew vile words at Maggie. Or was it at me? I couldn’t tell anymore. We may as well have been one person for how alike we were. Each of us broken. Each of us harboring a secret about something terrible we’d done.

  His accusations swirled in the air around me until finally, mercifully, the drugs kicked in and he drifted off to sleep. I sat there, hugging my knees to my chest and shaking for what seemed like forever. I considered placing a pillow over his mouth, pressing down, cutting off his oxygen until I forgot his words. Until he could no longer use them to hurt me or Maggie or anyone.

  By the time Uncle Jim came to collect me, I’d found the will to stand and I managed to follow him quietly to the car. The ride home was much like the ride to Shady Acres, only this time Uncle Jim sang Elvis songs and tried to make me laugh. I played along—singing Suspicious Minds—until we got home. The sun had set and the river was calling me. I barely waited for Uncle Jim to shift the car into park before I took off, tearing my clothes from my body as I went. Through the woods. Into the clearing. Wading out into the river until I was deep enough to sink under.

  At least now I understood why Maggie never went to visit her father. Why she’d screamed at Uncle Jim the one and only time he’d left me alone in the man’s care. “Did he touch you?” she’d asked me later at home while she stripped me naked in the bathroom. “Did he? You can tell me? I won’t let him do it again.”

  I’d been too young then to understand. I’d thought she had been asking if he hit me, but I recognized the look in Grandpa’s eyes when he thought I was Maggie. The one that had pierced through me when he swore that Maggie would never escape him.

  I’d told her no that day because he hadn’t touched me. Maybe he’d have tried if I’d been alone with him longer but Maggie had insisted that Uncle Jim go get me back the instant she’d found out he’d left me with my grandfather. She’d made him drive her to Grandpa’s house. She’d screamed at Uncle Jim the whole way home. She’d dragged me away from the nice man with the butterscotch in his pocket and I’d hated her for it.

  We’d slept together that night in her bedroom, Maggie curled around me, her tears soaking my forehead as she stroked my hair and whispered promises to protect me in my ear. It was the only time I’d ever seen her cry.

  I stayed in the water until I no longer had the strength to stay afloat and I drifted to sleep that night thinking of the time Maggie drove us to the house in the m
ountains where she and Uncle Jim had spent their summers as kids. It was rustic and homey, with walls of knotty pine and a deck overlooking an expansive lake where you could swim when the weather warmed.

  Uncle Jim and Becca arrived before us. Becca’s maroon Chevy Tahoe was parked in the driveway, covered in a fresh coat of snow. We pulled in behind her in Maggie’s Toyota Tercel and I could hear the snow crunching beneath the tires. As we exited the car, Uncle Jim bounded down the steps to greet us, lifting Maggie off her feet in a big old bear hug and then carrying me and our bags into the house. It was the most excited I’d ever seen him.

  “Becca’s making dinner,” he told Maggie as we ascended the stairs. “She brought her nephews,” he added for my benefit. “I think you’ll like ‘em. Henry’s ‘bout your age.”

  In fact, Henry had been twelve, three years older and completely obsessed with a Sonic the Hedgehog video game he’d brought along and thoroughly uninterested in playing with me. Brett was seventeen but he was nicer. He’d played card games with me while the grown-ups got drunk on the deck.

  Their laughter snuck in through the open door when Maggie entered to stumble her way to the bathroom down the hall. Even though Maggie was drunk, I didn’t care. Uncle Jim and Becca had clearly had too much as well and for me that made it okay. I remember thinking how much better everything was in the mountains. How much happier we all were. And I remember wondering if we could stay there forever.

  “Want some popcorn?” Brett had asked. “I could make us some.”

  “I do,” Henry called from his spot on the loveseat in front of the television.

  I’d nodded as I captured his queen of hearts with a king of clubs. Brett stood and went into the kitchen to cook while I moved to take a seat beside Henry to watch him play. It wasn’t until the foul odor of burned popcorn filled my nostrils that I realized Brett had disappeared.

  I turned the stove off and removed the tinfoil popcorn pan from the burner. Tossing it into the sink, I ran cold water over it until steam ceased to rise from the surface, then I went in search of Brett. I found him in our bedroom with his hand shoved down Maggie’s pants and his tongue down her throat.